Google News Archive Forum

I have a website with over 100,000 pages the front page is a PR of 5,, if i drop say 50% of my pages will i see an increase in my rankings for my remaining pages,or will i see adrop in PR as i interlink my site a lot and some of the pages i will be dropping are PR 4 or in some cases Pr 5 pages.

A drop of pages would (in average) lead to an increase of PR of the pages left. The total amount of PR for your site will be (more or less) the same but it is distributed over less pages. However, in most of the cases you won't see any effect in the toolbar.

I wouldn't reduce the number of pages because this would (probably) also change the number of incoming links for a page as well as the link text. Also, more pages (assuming that there is enough different content) normally leads to more search engine traffic, because you can optimize the pages for different phrases.

The only problem I see is that you might have some problems to get your whole site indexed if your main page is only a PR5.

with each internal page contributing to the PR flowing around the site - chopping 50,000 pages worth of contributary PR (even if only "baserate" 0.15 to 0.25) is surely gonna have some effect on the site?

I would agree, as mentioned above, that the additional PR from incoming links will be spread out throughout fewer pages - but this is surely gonna be offset by the reduction of "internally generated" PR?

As said by doc_z, if you then include the changes to internal link structure & link text reduction etc, you might well find it best not to cut your pages......

you're correct that pages should generate some internal PR (a real PR of one per page for normal link structures) according to the original algorithm. However, for the current algorithm you won't see this effect.

Shouldn't we be answering a different question here? Why is the home page PR so low when the page count is so high.

I've got a site with 250 pages where the home page is PR5, and that's simply because every page on the site has a "go to home" link that pushes some of the PR back to the top. (Yes, I know it slides back down again, but linking every page to the home page can elevate its PR more than only sections of the site).

Indeed, shaping the linking structure more carefully enables one to make certain low level pages (ones that your really don't care whether they come up in a search or not) give up most of their PR to other pages. Other deep pages can be given extra links from above to elevate their position in the SERPS.

On the grounds that you won't get the first 100,000 entries in the SERPS if you have a 100,000 page site, I'd work more on distributing the PR you have, to the pages you want. After all, you can give your home page 100,000 different backlinks...